Watching Technorati has been part of my daily routine nowadays but I didn’t notice that they’ve recently added an Authority slide until I read it over at Techcrunch.
The authority slider filters the search results for blogs in 4 categories: any authority, little authority, some authority and a lot of authority. The authority scale is measured by the number of inbound links but nowhere can you find what number of links will up you a notch. I tried it on my blog (which has 218 links) and it passed the “some authority” point.
Although there seems to be a good use for this noise filtering, I feel it labeled the “authority” feature a bit disproportionate.
Inbound links may indicate that a certain blog is popular among his peers but it does not make that blog an authority on just about any topic it blogs. Some people compares this feature to Page Rank but that’s even far off. It would have been better if they factored in the PR though (and tag cloud density as well).
Still, Technorati gets an A for effort.
Here’s Dave Sifry’s explanation of the Authority slider (and why they called it that way): http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000420.html
That article is his second part of his 2006 blog zeitgeist as head guy of Technorati. (Lot’s of interesting things there.)